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Published: June 23rd 2006
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Juan Les Pins
near our hotel, view of the ocean Juan Les Pins, France:
Picture perfect is what they say, and as cliché as it is, it is more true than ever here in the French Riviera. Just the train and bus rides have beautiful views of the ocean and palm trees, but in Juan Les Pins, they actually have sand beaches instead of the rocky ones elsewhere. From here, we are about 5 minutes to Antibes, 15 to Cannes, 20-25 to Nice, and about 45 minutes to Monte Carlo. After doing a bit of organizing and prioritizing, we decided to spend our first night in Monte Carlo because it was the furthest away and we wanted to be there at night. As soon as you get near the city coming in from the south, you can see across the harbor to the Casino square and all the lights of the city. What an incredible place. Definitely a bit overrated, but spending one night there was a great idea and I basically saw everything that I wanted to. We didn’t get a tour of the Prince’s palace, but we walked up to it and walked around, and saw the amazing view from the palace. We at dinner at the Café
Juan Les Pins
Postcard material du Paris, which is across from the Hotel du Paris and part of the hotel, with an incredible view of the Casino in the middle. We walked the streets and saw the Hermitage and all the high end shops, we watched people go in and out of the Casino in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and other luxury cars, and everything was going great until we went looking for the clubs we wanted to go to.
There is a complex called Le Sporting Monte Carlo that is host to a casino of course, many shops, two restaurants and a club. The restaurants are called Fuji and Bar & Beouf, one is an Asian cuisine, and the other is a surf and turf kind of place. We were told to skip these places in lieu of the Café du Paris because a meal in one of these restaurants would be over €100 each, and they wouldn’t boast the same view of the Café. Definitely a good recommendation, and one that I will pass on to others because there is really nothing to see over in the complex at night. However, the club is called Jimmy’z, and like Les Caves du Roy, we were
Monaco
View from across the port told just to go and look so you can say you have been there. This is even more exclusive than the Roy, a place where a Heineken will run you about €50. But there is no cover if you can look the part, so we decided to give it a try. And as is the theme of our trip, the club was closed, and the only one worth going to wouldn’t get going till 3. So we just left and made it back to our hotel in Juan Les Pins by about 3am. I wasn’t really disappointed though because we definitely wouldn’t have bought anything in the club, I just wanted to see it. But we did get to see Monte Carlo, take our pictures, and now I can say I’ve been there. I will definitely put Monte Carlo on the list of places to return to later in life when I might enjoy it more, and I will absolutely be there on a weekend instead of a Tuesday night!
The next day in the French Riviera, we woke up and went out to Antibes to an open-air market that was supposedly worth seeing. It wasn’t much, but we
got some great strawberries. We walked out of there onto a boardwalk that follows the wall of an old fortress overlooking the water and the beaches. We were in Antibes for about 2 hours before we were tired of it and left for Cannes. Cannes was great. It was packed with people everywhere, in the streets and on the beaches, and that day they were having a free music festival in all of France. They were setting up stages everywhere, and we decided that we would come back to Cannes that night to enjoy the happenings. So we left Cannes by about 2 or 3 and headed back to Juan Les Pins where we spent the rest of the afternoon at the beach before it started to rain a little and we headed in for naps.
After sleeping for an hour or so, we showered and got dressed to go back to Cannes. We didn’t make it to the dinner table until a little after 10, but it was well worth it. We went to the oldest restaurant in Cannes, Auberge Provencale, founded in 1860. We were recommended to eat here, and we figured it would be a good
Monte Carlo
Hotel de Paris bet because after so long, and in the exact same location, you would think they had gotten at least something right! The menu was simple and very expensive, but they had a prix fix menu that was great. We got really lucky and snagged the last remaining table outside on a small alley that was packed with people and restaurants. The music festival was going on so there was live music everywhere and you could hear it from the table. Our 3-course meal took almost 2 hours and by the time we made it away from the table and our bottle of white wine we were exhausted. Wining and dining is really more of a workout than you might think! But we spent a couple of hours walking the boardwalk in Cannes where there were thousands of people in the streets. There was an advertising convention going on so they had several of the beach clubs rented out and turned into beach discos. Unfortunately as hard as we tried, we couldn’t get into any of them. We were turned down at all 4 of the ones on the boardwalk before we finally gave up. I tried everything I could think
Monte Carlo
Cafe de Paris (where we ate dinner) of, talking my head off at the door trying to get in. I told most of the bouncers that Park and I worked for MTV in Los Angeles and we were researching for a new show called, “Where in the World.” Some were pretty interested, but they were all private functions for the convention and we couldn’t get into any of them, but I had fun trying.
The next day we wanted to have one last beach day but we didn’t get up in time so we just took our time getting out of the hotel and went into Nice where our train to Geneva left from. We ate lunch and boarded the 6-hour train to Geneva, where I can’t wait to unpack my things and get rid of this stupid suitcase!
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